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IMPORTANT NOTE
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Alongside the usual themes of the SPMRL workshop, this year's event
will feature a special theme on the objective and the design of a
shared task on parsing MRLs. See further details below.

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PRESENTATION
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Since the advent of large syntactically annotated corpora, statistical
parsing has been a cornerstone of research in NLP. While Penn Treebank
parsing performance, be it dependency-based or constituency-based, seems
to have reached a high plateau, the same cannot be said of other
languages, data sets and domains.

Statistical parsing of morphologically-rich languages (MRLs) has
repeatedly been shown to exhibit a plethora of nontrivial challenges,
including sparse lexica in the face of rich inflectional systems, parsing
deficiency in the face of free word order and tree- bank annotation
idiosyncrasies in the face of morphosyntactic interactions.
Recent studies on parsing languages such as German, Arabic, Hebrew or
French using newly available treebanks contribute to our understanding of
the extent of the difficulty that such phenomena pose when reusing parsing
models initially designed to parse English. Beyond the technical and
linguistic difficulties, the lack of communication between researchers
working on different MRLs can lead to a reinventing the wheel syndrome.

Following the warm reception of the first SPMRL workshop at NAACL-HLT
2010, the second SPMRL workshop aims to build upon the success of the
first and offer a platform to this growing community of interests. We
solicit papers describing parsing experiments with models and
architectures for languages with morphological structure richer than
English, or studies that address the lexical sparseness challenges (for
any language).
In order to provide a realistic indication of the performance of parsing
systems on unstructured and unanalyzed data, we particularly encourage
contributions reporting parsing results for non-gold as well as gold
morphological analysis of the test data, before or jointly with the parser.

The areas of interest of the second SPMRL workshop include, but are not
limited to, the following topics:
* Parsing models and architectures that explicitly integrate morphological
analysis and parsing
* Parsing models and architectures that focus on lexical coverage and the
handling of OOV words either by incorporating linguistic knowledge or
through the use of unsupervised/semi-supervised learning techniques
* Cross-language and cross-model comparison of models' strength and
weaknesses in the face of particular linguistic phenomena (e.g.
morphosyntactic characteristics, degree of word-order freedom ...)
* Comprehensive analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of various parsing
models on particular linguistic (e.g. morphosyntactic) phenomena with
respect to variation in tagsets, annotation schemes and additional data
transformations

This year's SPMRL workshop will feature a special theme concerning the Shared
Task on Statistical Parsing of MRLs. Following the panel discussion in previous
events we intend the first shared task on parsing MRLs to take place in 2012 and
we now solicit position papers that aim to discuss the goals, scope, design,
expected contributions and desired outcomes of such a shared task. The accepted
papers will be included in the SPMRL proceedings. In addition we plan to hold a
panel discussion in which we expect to discuss a range of relevant topics including
(but not limited to) cross-language parse representation, cross-annotation evaluation,
MRLs-specific architectural concerns, and so on.
We aim to use this panel discussion to help us devise a set of clearly defined objectives
for the 2012 shared task and to make concrete decisions about practicalities such
as scope, size, representation, languages, evaluation, etc.

SUBMISSION
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Authors are invited to submit long papers (up to 9 pages + references) and
short papers (up to 5 pages + references). Long papers should describe
unpublished, substantial and completed research. Short papers should be
position papers, papers describing work in progress or short, focused
contributions.
Papers will be accepted until July 31, 2011, (PDT, GMT-8) in PDF format
via the START system : https://www.softconf.com/c/spmrl2011/
Submitted papers must follow the styles and the formating guidelines
available from the last ACL-HLT recommendations
(http://www.acl2011.org/authors.shtml). As the reviewing will be blind,
the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations.
Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We
previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided. Instead, use
citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." Papers that
do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. In
addition, please do not post your submissions on the web until after the
review process is complete.

SPONSORS
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This workshop is sponsored by SIGPARSE and by the INRIA's Alpage project.
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